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Coalition of Pan Africanists (CPA) has taken a swipe at the International Criminal Court (ICC) stating that world international body is a threat to peace in Africa.

Addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday, spokesperson for CPA, Ayure Kapini, stressed that it was sad to see the ICC choose a path that has and continues to rob Africans of their fundamental human rights and freedoms.

That development, according to her, has encouraged impunity based on political leanings of the perpetrator in several African countries.

“…ICC has invaded and hijacked the internal workings of some judicial authorities in African countries that are State Parties [African countries] to the Rome Statue,” Ayure Kapini averred.

The Principle of Complementarity, he explained, is a provision in the Roman Statue that ensures that the jurisdiction of the legal regimes of State Parties is not breached by ICC.

Unfortunately, the CPA spokesperson said the ICC has over the past years been arm- twisting weak African countries with the tacit approval of the West.

And these African countries, he asserted, have acquiesced to the dictates and pressures from the ICC and its Western allies.

In the estimation of CPA, ICC’s “actions and inactions run counter to established rules o engagement as spelt out by the Roman Statue and domestic laws of African countries.

Ayure Kapini also pointed out that loads of evidence of ICC’s selective retributive justice and discrimination against Africans abound.

Buttressing this claim, he cited a July 2008 incident where the then Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Gabriel Moreno-Ocampo, told the International Press in an interview that he had asked Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to refer their cases to the ICC.

“At that same material time, there was an avalanche of complaints against some Western personalities who were proven to have committed war crimes against humanity.

…We wonder why the ICC did not invite those countries through warrant for them to hand over their citizens involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he said.

According to him, the “illegal invasion” of Iraq by the Westerners has, till date, not been investigated.

“The Office of the ICC Prosecutor reported in February 2006 that it had received 240 communications in connection with the invasion. Many of these complaints concerned the British participation in the invasion and the open mass killing of innocent Iraqi women and children by American and British invaders and their unholy allies.”

To this end, Ayure Kapini asked: “What number of people must perish before investigation and prosecution starts.”

The CPA was equally worried by what it described as the “selectivity and bias” on the part of ICC.

“We are also worried about the attempt to impose a retributive European model of justice on us which is antithetical to the African restorative model. This was the reason why the President of Uganda, Yoweri Moseveni, asked the ICC to drop charges against members of the dreaded Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), saying that traditional justice would be a more effective tool for dealing with fighters of the rebel group,” Ayure Kapini lamented.

Ayure Kapini continued that the pervasion of justice, political profiling and racism, which are the hallmark of ICC, have exposed the double standards of the international court.

Against this backdrop, the CPA spokesperson asserted that the entire international justice system was laden with “unfairness and an agenda to prosecute leaders that are not quisling of the Western powers.